I.

  A: Just our luck.
  B: Don't worry, we'll make our tee time.
  A: They always go by when you've got the green light.
  B: Or when you gotta get home quick and go to the bathroom.
  A: Yeah.
  B: But I bet you haven't see one lately.
  A (after a moment's thought): Maybe not recently.
  B: Seems as if most are packing only people we know.
  A: What about all the names in the obituary column?
  B: All people you've never heard of.
  A: Go ahead, the procession's over.
  B: Red light. And do you ever find anyone you know in the obituaries?
  A: Sure, once in a while.
  B: But not often.
  A: What are you getting at?
  B: Nothing? except that people aren't dying as much anymore.
  A: There've been medical advancements.
  B: More advanced than most people think.
  A: What about all the important people the news media say died?
  B: Do you believe everything you hear?
  A: They're supposed to tell the truth.
  B: Maybe they don't know what I know. They're given the obituaries, why
should they think something's wrong?
  A: What the heck do you know? What's so wrong that?? Go, now.
  B: Okay. Well, there's overpopulation. Too many on Medicare and Social
Security. Maybe they don't want to scare us.
  A: Who ?they?? Scare us about what?
  B: Smallpox has virtually been eliminated.
  A: I know. So what's that got to??
  B: And it's probably not the only one?.
  A: Polio. The bubonic plague's supposedly making a comeback. What the
hell are you saying?
  B: The plague. Sure. But do you notice where it's resurfacing? Not
New York City or Chicago or Paris. Manchuria and Indo-China, for Christ's
sakes. To throw us off the track. Create an artificial worry to distract
us from the main one.
  A: Like trying to distract me from my golf game. Besides, you didn't
answer why they wouldn't tell us.
  B: Just like they make better golf clubs and balls. Not that the golfers
are any better. We'll be able to drive to greens on par fives in a few
years.
  A: What the hell are you driving at?
  B: Maybe the most diabolic scheme?.
  A: Who's doing it? The government? Come on, be reasonable. The bureaucrats
can't even get the mail delivered on time.
  B: The government. And private industry. In fact, the formers at the
beck and call of the latter.
  A: You're telling me the government's preventing people from dying!
  B: You've made the correct conclusion. Do you think they'll ever make
this road four lanes?
  A: Not in our lifetime. I heard the original plans to do so were laid
forty years ago. But if no one dies, there won't be space enough for those
getting born and growing up. Not to mention what we'll do with the waste.
 Hell, the population's too much as it is. I read that India's going to
be the most populated country in the world by 2030. And Nigeria?ll have
more people than the United States.
  B: That's why there are so few being born. That I know is a fact.
  A: In the U.S.
  B: Our country's hep to the problem.
  A: The government can't control stuff like being born and dying.
  B: Ever hear of planned parenthood? I'm telling you, it's happening.
  A: The policies are contradictory.
  B: I know one part of the government wants to keep people from having
kids, like they've been trying in China.
  A: Unsuccessfully.
  B: But not for the lack of trying. You can't tell people to stop doing
what they enjoy doing best.
  A: Living?
  B: No, you dope, having sex.
  A: I wouldn't say that's what we do best. If our wives were still around.
. . .
  B: Had to be some reason why she left me. Anyway, the other part of our
government doesn't want anyone to die because death makes everyone unhappy.
  A: What about the funeral procession we just saw? There must have been
thirty-
five or forty cars.
  B: Fake. I'm sure there must be real ones. Accidents happen. Murders.
But most are fake. When something can be done, someone?ll do it. I know
a guy who worked for the government who told me that it's government policy
to suppress all information regarding ?eternal life? experiments. The same
way they covered up flying saucers. There may even be connection between
the two.
  A: Aw, come on.
  B: I can't believe you never heard about any of this.
  A: Not a peep. Not that I follow this stuff like you.
  B: I've known about it for thirty years. Read an article about it on
my honeymoon.
  A: How come you never mentioned it?
  B: I think about it whenever I see a funeral or see in the news someone
has really died.
  A: I still can't believe it.
  B: You don't have to. This doesn't bother you in the least?
  A: I don't know if I'd mind living past a hundred. As long as I can swing
a club and get a cart to take me around the course.
  B: I'm talking about ?forever?.
  A: That means being alone forever. Nope.
  B: I'll take being a bachelor in my last years over the married life.
  A: Did you ever hear of that thing. . .people frozen when they're. . .Disney,
I think did it. . .of course, he could afford it.
  B: Of course. Resurrection experiments. Freeze drying people until their
diseases are curable. Part of the same conspiracy.
  A: Why can't government leave the balance of life alone?
  B: The government had to get in on it because the private corporations
were already going ahead. . . .
  A: There's nothing we can do.
  B: Soon, no one will be allowed to die. Before, governments like the
Nazis tried to kill all the undesirables. It's reversed now. The government
will eventually not let anyone die.
  A: I hope I'm dead before it gets that far.

II.

  C: More dessert?
  B: Thanks, Claire, I'm stuffed.
  D: No, dear, but I'll have more coffee.
  C: And?.
  B: Why not?
  D: It's nice that we could get together for dinner. Brothers shouldn't
be so distant. It's not like we live on the other side of the universe.
  B: I'm pretty busy.
  C: You've seen many good movies?
  B: I rarely go.
  D: You used to.
  B: A waste of time.
  D: We're starting to sound like our parents.
  B: The movies are getting too unrealistic.
  D: There've been several good historical ones.
  B: I doubt if?.
  C: Yes, we saw one you'd really like.
  D: Apollo 13.
  B: I don't think I'd be interested.
  C: How can you say that?
  D: You remember the story. The second flight after Armstrong walked on
the moon.
  C: Before the one when they played golf, I think.
  D: It almost didn't re-enter the earth's atmosphere.
  C: They never got to start their mission on the moon.
  B: If you believe we ever got to the moon.
  C: ?.
  D: ?.
  C: He's joking.
  B: Just what I said.
  D: Remember the night when Apollo 11 landed. We were watching?.
  B: On television at the restaurant where we were busing tables. I remember
thinking then that it seemed a little phony.
  D: I don't remember you saying anything?.
  B: It's not a popular opinion.
  C: You can't actually believe? that all these years?.
  D: He's yanking our chain. He saw them walking? how could they fake something
like that?
  B: With the technology available, very easily. No, wait, before you go
off thinking I'm a crackpot. How do we really know that what we saw was
really happening? That it wasn't faked? Can you prove for a fact that
we have had men on the moon or people floating in outer space on a space
station?
  C: There have been broadcasts from the shuttle when it hooked up to the
Mir.
  B: All simulation. Why I should I believe what the media tells me or
what the government tells the media to tell me to believe. If I don't see
it, if nobody can prove it to me, I'm not going to believe it.
  D: How do we know anything unless we're told somehow?
  B: That's a basic problem.
  C: So I've know you all these years?.
  B: More and more people see it the way I do. Nearly twenty percent.
  D: See it more and more wrongly.
  B: What about the Kennedy assassination?
  D: I know some curious things about it can't be explained.
  C: I'm with him on that one.
  B: It used to be that most people believed the conclusions of the Warren
Report. Lone nut assassin. Now it's reversed. Nearly eighty percent believe
in a conspiracy.
  D: The landing on the moon is completely different. It was on live television.
  C: So was Ruby's shooting of Oswald!
  B: Did seeing allow us to make the right connections to those who hired
Ruby to shut up the patsy?
  D: It hasn't been proven that Ruby was hired by anyone.
  B: Not yet. But everything's been distorted some way. Nothing's the
way it's been handed down to us.
  D: No. No, you can't dish out radical skepticism and say that a well-known
fact accepted by nearly everyone didn't occur.
  B: Why not? You can't begin to stop counting all the things that people
have believed that they don't believe anymore.
  C: Who's to say that the new information is correct?
  B: That proves my point. You can't. Besides, I can't believe that human
beings could do something as impossible as surviving in outer space for
great lengths of time. It may be possible but not very easy and certainly
not easy to overcome.
  D: It wasn't. And how do you think they could fake the liftoffs? Hundreds
of thousands watch those things at Cape Canaveral.
  B: The rockets probably got to outer space.
  C: You just can't fake these things. The men jumping around. . . .
  B: All done in a studio.
  D: Why?
  B: NASA wants everyone to believe that the money invested in the space
program is worthwhile. At some point, they discovered that they couldn't
stay in outer space very long, but got the people hyped up.
  C: The Russians, too?
  B: Especially them. They faked their space walks. You told me about
them.
  D: They did fake the first one or several, if I remember correctly. But
NASA isn't involved in any cover-up. You just recounted the plot of a movie.
. . .
  C: I remember. Wasn't Telly Savalas flying a cropdusting plane or something?
  D: In the desert no less. What was the name?
  B: I don't remember it.
  C: Yes, it had the same plot. Hal Holbrook was the head of the space
program. Elliot Gould was the reporter who discovered the plot. O.J. Simpson
played one of the astronauts.
  D: Capricorn One.
  C: Yes.
  B: The movie was based on the stories going around.
  D: It certainly matches the story you told.
  B: Was it a recent?
  C: The Seventies, I think.
  B: Never heard of it. Regardless, I'm not going to trust what they're
telling me about walking on the moon.
  C: Is there anything else you don't believe they're telling us?

III

  C: What are you thinking about?
  D: How'd you know I was awake?
  C: Your breathing. You came to bed an hour and a half ago. You're not
replaying that conversation again?
  D: Doesn't believe slavery was as bad as the history books say. The Holocaust
never happened.
  C: You can't let his opinions worry you.
  D: He's my brother. People'll associate his views with me. Besides,
I hate to let anyone get away with such opinions. That kind of? reasoning?.
  C: I believe he said that he didn't think six million Jews were killed
during the Holocaust.
  D: Where's he come up with this stuff?
  C: More like a couple hundred thousand.
  D: What's the difference how many?
  C: Don't argue with me. He's your brother.
  D: He's actually a very nice guy.
  C: Except when Jews and blacks are around.
  D: No, he hangs around with Jews and blacks. A friend of his had a kid
who was nearly killed in a car crash. He went to the hospital for two months
when the kid was in a coma. They were Jewish. You wouldn't have caught
me going to the hospital once for any kid fourteen and intoxicated driving
and crashing a car.
  C: How'd he get so many goofy opinions?
  D: He reads a lot.
  C: Seriously.
  D: Our father was pretty prejudiced. He thought Johnson arranged both
Kennedy assassinations.
  C: I never heard your brother's opinion about the JFK deal in Dallas.
  D: He thinks Oswald did it.
  C: What?
  D: Just when you think you have him pegged, right? Actually, his logic's
about the same. He thinks a conspiracy would have had to have been so huge
that, well, he couldn't imagine anything that big being carried out. Like
the Holocaust.
  C: But he said there was a conspiracy.
  D: No, he was talking about the percentage of people who believed there
was a conspiracy. To prove his argument about the moon landings not happening.
  C: I don't get his views on Lincoln and Washington.
  D: He thinks the history books have exaggerated how great they were.
But I tried to tell him that few historians consider the Founding Fathers
saints.
  C: He must be still thinking of the books he had in grade school in the
Fifties.
  D: Probably. It's so frustrating. . .anyone can take his view and disbelieve
anything that's reported. Historians should have his sense of empiricism!
 Only he's selective to fit his prejudices. Besides, it's past the point
of anyone proving that we've gone to the moon or that the Holocaust happened.
 He's got to offer some evidence for these things not happening. But he
won't.
  C: Not motivated?
  D: No, he doesn't really care. I don't think he really does.
  C: An act?
  D: My sister thinks so. When I told her something he mentioned a few
months ago?.
  C: About people no longer being allowed to die.
  D: Yeah. She said he just says this for a reaction.
  C: To keep you up all night?
  D: Maybe he hasn't thought it through that far. I don't buy her explanation.
 I don't know what's going through his head.
  C: He sounds frustrated.
  D: About what? Is this going to be an amateur psychological analysis?
  C: Things haven't turned out very well for him. He had to go on disability.
 His marriage fell apart.
  D: Well, doctor, he was like this before those things happened.
  C: Maybe it's accelerating.
  D: The only thing that's accelerating is my mind keeping me awake.

IV.

  E: For fast relief, take Anacin.
  B (thinking): Bleeds the stomach.
  E: More doctors recommend Anacin than any other brand.
  B: They must have been paid by the company, then. Everybody's paid off.
 Just follow the money.
  E: In Sarajevo today, the guns were quiet no less today than any other
day. The leaders of the nations in former Yugoslavia?.
  B: Are going to start World War III just as they started the First World
War. The goddamn Balkans. Why don't they take our government's advice
and do the eternal life experiments?
  E: ?have agreed in principle to a cease-fire, which will began next week.
  B: When will this end? Small nations have always been the death of great
ones, all they know how to do is have these little wars? don't these newsmen
see this?
  E: It has been reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that the
latest tests on carcinogens in grilled hamburgers show increased incidents
of cancer when the hamburgers are cooked well down and, worse, cooked well
done on a charcoal grill.
  B: So the red meat'll kill you if it's not cooked or it's cooked too much.
  E: More and more doctors are leaning toward complete exclusion of red
meat from the human diet.
  B: Great. Don't eat meat, and the vegetables you substitute for meat
will be laced with some pesticide. Either that or animal rights people
will persecute you for eating a chicken.
  E: Today, our reporter, J______ J______, will look at alternative diets.
  B (thinking): While I check the alternative newscasts.
  F: This is the third day for the Shuttle astronauts?.
  B: You think we're all suckers.
  G: ...in the last three years SAT scores have risen in the United States.
  B: They changed the way they score the tests, you idiot.
  G: Tonight, in our ?Eye on America? report, we will take a look at America's
classrooms.
  B: Put computers in them. No kid should have to take a test, write a
note, read a book anymore. It should be all on computers. That's what
the future holds. What's the use of learning history. It's all distorted.
 Give the kids some practical skills. What are they worried about goddamn
geometry and physics. Who's ever going to use that stuff?

Just perpetuates teaching jobs in those subjects. They're all going to
be working for IBM and Microsoft. Who cares whether they know about cosines
and tangents and the Middle Ages?

V.

  B1: Answer the phone.
  B: Something always happens somewhere. Somebody is in control.
  G: Amateur investigators have gotten the green light to search thousands
of new documents sealed after the Warren Commission?.
  B1: The tenth ring. At least get an answering machine.
  B: Why does the government want us to believe there was a conspiracy to
kill him?
  G: Many of the papers can be downloaded on the Internet?.
  B: The Internet? a bunch of loonies
  B1: Who think like yourself. Admit it.
  B: If it's not a Manchurian candidate-like assassin?.
  B1: You haven't talked to your brother in awhile.
  G: ?Congress will argue what to do with the tax surplus?.
  B1: His wife thinks you're a bit off base with some of my ideas.
  B: ? the one guy thinks Jackie hired a hit man?.
  B1: Not that your brother doesn't. He likes to argue. She just doesn't
want to be associated with someone who rejects some of her basic. . . .
  G: The new Chinese octuplets, weighing from ten ounces to a pound and a
half
?.
  B1: You don't like her anyway. But he's not standing up for you, apparently.
  B: Just what they need. What's next? Cryogenics for India?
  B1: Call Al then. You haven't golfed with him in six months.
  B: I'll finish the book on alien abductions, maybe go to a ballgame tomorrow.
  B1: You can't stand to be contradicted.
  H: The turf is dry and the horses are entering the starting gates.
  B: At least that's real. What's happening is right there. On the track.
 Forget about how fucked up the whole damn world has become. One of the
horses has to win.
No lawsuits. You can see it with your own eyes.
  B1: You don't believe the stuff that you do.
  B: And they'll be another race in a half-hour.
  B1: You'd hate the world that didn't have much wrong with it. That wouldn't
have time with your petty theories?.
  H: The winner is?.
.   B1: You never got over the fact that your mother had another child.
  B: Foul, foul. It had to be fixed.
  B1: Held it against the world ever since.
  G: ?had been missing for ten months until the remains were found?.
  B: The world's out of control.
  B1: Which is it, bright boy? Someone's controlling everything? or total
anarchy?
  B: I'm fed up with your shit.

VI.

  B1: It's been twenty minutes.
  B2: Leave him alone. The primetime shows won't be on for an hour.
  B1: Why do you want to protect him?
  B2: For the same reason you want to tear him apart.
  B1: He's got to know the truth about himself.
  B2: Which means seeing his brother? Dealing with his in-laws? condescension?
 Have him reminded why they never invited him to their daughter's christening?
  B1: He didn't go because he couldn't have children.
  B2: His wife couldn't.
  B1: Nothing was proven. He thought it was due to his serving on a nuclear
submarine. Or was it microwave ovens?
  B2: He never owned a microwave.
  B1: He hasn't seen another person for?.
  B2: He went to the food market?.
  B1: Surprised he eats anything with all the additives, dyes?.
  B2: Resignation to certain realities.
  B1: And be one of the few allowed to die!
  B2: You wonder why he doesn't want the company of other people--if this
is what he's subjected to?.
  B1: By himself!
  B2: Yes.
  B1: I'm surprised he doesn't have a theory about me.
  B2: He's considered the government messing around with people's dreams their
unconscious minds.
  B1: That we're just agents of an octopus-like agency commissioned to torment
this particular individual?
  B2: Can you prove we're not?

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